Paul was quiet, as he must be on Good Friday. Last Good Friday she had not known him at all. She looked back at herself then: self-contained, sad, lonely, desperate to be good for something more vital than looking after an old woman.
“We enter this yearly process of being abandoned by God,” Paul was saying, ending the homily, as Clary cracked the heavy door open and slipped inside. “But not without hope,” he said. “Although we become immersed again in the misery of betrayal and death, we know the end of this story, and our awareness of God grows within us.”
It surprised her that he talked so freely in a sermon, never condescending, when she knew him to be shy and stiff in real life. How could she criticize his foibles when her own were so large and identical? He was, however, the one clear-eyed witness to her heavy-handed charity, and her humiliation. And the one whose opinion mattered most to her. Even remembering the rocking raft of his bed, the phosphorescent waves, there was no way back to being with him. In fact she thought she hated him.
Everything around her sank, tides pulled the ocean floor away, unreliable sand. She had stayed in the shadows of the side aisle arches, and she stepped quietly backwards, making sure he did not see her, until she could duck out the side door and go home. Good Friday was no day for talking.
47. Triumph
Noise outside woke Dolly. Not loud: the eaves-drop sound of her parents talking on the front step. She pushed the covers back and got up. The bunk bed creaked and shifted, like it never had at Clary’s house, but Trevor did not stir. Dolly went quietly to the window and leaned against the window screen, the sharp metal squares graphing her forehead.
Their bedroom looked out on the front here, instead of onto the back yard like at Clary’s. She could see the driveway and Darwin’s old car that was theirs now, that he’d left for them when he took Fern to Vancouver, so her dad could give back Clary’s mother’s car. She missed the Dart. She leaned her elbows on the windowsill and listened. The screen door opened and closed, her mother going inside for something. Her dad sat sideways on the top step, one foot lounging down. She could see the smoke he blew out, and smell it, mixed with beer. Quiet for a Saturday night. Maybe it was really late. The street lamp a few doors down buzzed, a different sound than the crickets but slightly the same. No other noise but a motorcycle puttering down the road. The night smell of the pavement was black and wet, like it had rained, but it had not.
The motorcycle slowed, ran softly up the driveway at their house, and stopped. The man pulled off his helmet. It was Darwin, sitting on that big tattered motorcycle. He had long leather pant legs tied over his jeans.
“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going, Clayton?”
Her dad rustled his back on the side of the wall but didn’t stand up or go down to meet Darwin. Dolly could not call out herself, because tomorrow was Easter eggs, and she was supposed to be asleep, not listening at the window. But she was tired of her dad not liking Darwin. The motorcycle had the word Triumph on it.
“Going okay,” her dad said, finally, after a couple puffs on his cigarette.
Darwin walked up, still slow, not barging in. “How’s Lorraine?”
Her dad laughed, meanly. “Took you long enough to ask. Where you been?”
“I go where the wind goes,” Darwin said. He laughed too, but like he meant it. He leaned on the stair-post at the bottom of the steps and unbuckled his side straps.
“What you been doing?”
“Oh, you know, establishing justice on earth.”
“Butting in.” Dolly could see her dad’s hand grind his cigarette out on the step. His hand looked white and small. His skinny wrist stretched far out of his jacket cuff, that old blue mark on his wrist-bone showing.
Darwin lifted his head and looked straight at her window. “Nice night,” he said. She was pretty sure he couldn’t see her, but she waved anyway, to show somebody was glad to see him.
“You’re getting here late enough.”
“A long ride through the mountains,” Darwin said.
“Got your bike back, eh? Have a beer,” her dad said. He shoved the beer case with his foot, scraping it across the concrete with a snow-shovel noise.
“How’s Lorraine?” Darwin asked again.
“She’s fine. She’s working, my boss’s wife got her a couple days cleaning here and there.”
“She ready for that?”
Dolly waited for her dad to say something, but he didn’t speak.
After a pretty long time he did.
“How’s Vancouver?” he asked Darwin, his voice too loud for the night.
Darwin shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“Been a while since I was out there—you see Garvin and those guys? Juice and Shayla and them?” Her dad laughed some more, like at a dirty joke. Dolly laid her head down on her arm, straightening out her legs one in front of the other as if she was an Egyptian, and gave her forehead a rest from the metal lines of the screen. She thought about that ad of the boy on the bus, and how his face shone the way her dad’s used to.
At the doorway of the kids’ room, checking on them, Lorraine heard Clayton say all that about Vancouver, about Shayla Morton and Garvin, that scary creep. She left her hand lightly on the doorknob, not moving a molecule, and watched Dolly bending down her head. Too much for Dolly to have to hear. She probably remembered Garvin from before.
Darwin said he’d heard they were around.
Clayton popped open another beer. “Yeah. While you were out there, I was thinking. Maybe I’ll drive out there myself in the summer.”
He was going to leave—even Dolly would be able to hear that.
Never mind, Lorraine thought. The middle of her body felt empty. She was not even mad, she just wondered, if she had to quit working, how long the disability would last. She did not think Moreland would kick her and the kids out. The pay-out for the Dart had come in March and she’d kept it, marked egg whites, in the freezer. $2,500 would see her and the kids through a couple months.
She could make him stay, if she wanted to. But maybe it would be a relief not to have to look after him. She was stronger now, it would be okay. She backed away from the door so Dolly wouldn’t know that she’d heard, and wouldn’t have to worry. And so she could go out and hug Darwin, and be peaceful because he was there, for however long he would be.
Dolly waited till her mom was gone, and then curled back up in bed.
She dreamed that Darwin came in and kissed her good night, leaning down with his jacket smelling of smoke, but not cigarette smoke. Wood smoke and hides being tanned. The one who forms the mountains, the soundtrack in her dream said in a rich, manly voice, like if church was a movie ad.
Late as it was, Paul was still at his computer trying to finish the sermon for Easter morning. Darwin’s foot on the porch brought him down the stairs at a gallop, knowing who it was—he had to pause before he opened the door, not to seem crazily eager. But restraint flew away as Darwin stepped forward to meet him, like brothers meeting in the wilderness.
“Where are you staying?” Paul said.
“Crashing here a couple days, if you don’t mind?”
Paul pushed the door wider and took Darwin’s duffle bag. “I’ve been pining for company,” he said. “Clary and I fell apart, it was my fault.”
He hadn’t thought that consciously before. Lisanne had not been his fault, but Clary was.
“Things change,” Darwin said. But did that mean they changed from perfect to imperfect, or that they could change again?
Early on Sunday morning Clary answered the phone without checking to see who was calling, which she hadn’t done for months, and it was Grace.
“We’re back,” Grace said.
Clary couldn’t think what to say.
“Welcome back!” Grace said, prompting her. “Hawaii was hot, Vancouver was rainy, we’ve been back for a while now but we were pretty taken up with Fern’s news.”
“I’m glad to hear your voice,” Clary said finally.
“We’re guessing you’re mad at Moreland for letting them have the duplex,” Grace said, her voice not changing at all from normal. “That was all a pretty big shemozzle, her getting better. Might have been better if she had died after all.”
“No!” Clary said, the no torn out of her without thought.
“Well, exactly. And they needed a better place than that slum over north there. So I don’t think it was Moreland you were mad at.”
“Grace, don’t lecture me.”
“I wouldn’t attempt to. Pot calling the kettle black anyway because I’m as mad as a fist myself. Fern here is about to have a baby any day, and it appears that she’s planning to keep it and live out here with us, in the absence of an actual husband.”
There was a short silence. Grace leaving time for Clary to put it all in order; Clary thinking about how sleepy Fern had been in January. If it was Darwin’s baby, wouldn’t Darwin stay with Fern? He had left one child already. Was no one any good?
“Don’t worry, it’s that shithead Jack from the U of S again. She met up with him in October when she went out there, no matter what anyone said, and he was back in town at Christmas when she figured out about the baby. And I guess he’s the one who broke Darwin’s nose, too. So she’s spent a few weeks thrashing things out with him and his family, but he’s sticking with the new girlfriend instead, she’s richer. Fern says she’s over him, whatever that means. Apparently Darwin got him to sign papers relinquishing the baby, so at least we won’t have them breathing down our necks—him not suing over the broken nose might have helped with all that. But I’m fifty-six, here, I’m not that interested in a baby.”
“Fern will be fine,” Clary said. “She was wonderful with the children—”
How long since she had said the children?
“Well, I know that, but it’s a different thing to have your own. But all we can do is stay calm.”
“When is she due?”
“Oh, not till July, I’m exaggerating.”
“When it gets to be too much for you, come to town, I’ve got a nice quiet house now. I need to talk to Moreland—I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you both, but I was—”
“Fit to be tied—I bet you were. After all you did for them.”
“No, no, it wasn’t that—” But of course it was.
“It’s that Clayton. He’s prickly.”
“They have their own family. I was just a stop-gap.”
“Mm-hm.”
“But I miss them.” She hadn’t said that, even to Paul, even when she was still talking to Paul. “I broke up with Paul, too. ‘Broke up’—that sounds so teenagey.”
“What on earth did you do that for?”
Clary sat down in a kitchen chair. Since this was going to take a while.
“I don’t know, Grace. I was mad. I don’t know.”
“Well, you may not want my advice but I think you’ve lost your mind.”
“No, I don’t think so. His wife had just left, he was still in pain. He couldn’t even talk to me. He only quoted poems to me all the time.” How childish she sounded!
“I wish Moreland would quote a poem or two,” Grace said. “Were you hard on him?”
Clary did not answer.
On Easter morning she tried again to talk to Paul, again thinking church might be the most natural place, while half-conscious that she was somehow sabotaging any hope of real conversation. Maybe it would be comfortingly familiar to go to church on Easter, sing Alleluia. Even if it was all hooey.
Watching the women laugh and jostle each other as they stood for the annual Easter Hat photo in the garden after church, she thanked God (or the vacuum of Nature) that she had not worn a hat, and that she had no responsibility in the parish. No need to be friendly, as she would have had to be as Paul’s wife, or whatever they might have become. No bounden duty and service for her. All these women must know that she and Paul had been—whatever they had been. But none of them said anything, not this time. They might be protecting her, the way one or another would come and talk, would shift her attention this way or that, away from Paul, or break the line of sight. She didn’t know why she had come. Now that he had mentioned the carpet she could hardly meet his eyes, for the images recurring.
She could not come back to church, it was impossible.
April Anthony had outdone herself: an Easter cake with coloured eggs in toasted-coconut nests. Trevor would love that cake. Clary was dying for a piece of it herself, suddenly hungry after a long Lent. She could see Paul’s head bobbing above someone’s hat as he nodded, being a careful priestly listener. He was full of flaws, an irritating combination of self-deprecation, self-importance and self-consciousness. He was emotionally spent. And so was she. She loved his nose and his dutifulness.
The question she asked herself, watching fascinated as Paul’s head appeared and disappeared behind the ribbon-swooped, straw-boater-based confection on Mary Tolliver’s head, was this: What was her liability? How much of all this was her fault, and how much did she owe, or could she expect, in compensation?
48. Things change
It was on the kitchen calendar when Clary turned over to May. Trevor had written the wobbly red letters in January: The Bug Play. When the 10th came around Clary was at school anyway, and she thought she might as well walk down to the gym. Fooling herself into thinking she was fooling herself.
The music teacher had worked all term with them. Caterpillars, army ants, ladybugs: each genus had its accompanying song. Two Grade 3 girls did a swaying, in-folding dragonfly dance while the children sang. Trevor’s firefly song was at the end of the program: “Things Change.” His class trooped in and arranged themselves in rows, and a teacher by the door turned the lights off. Each firefly had a flashlight.
At times, things may look dark.
Some days you’ve lost your spark…
Their little voices were so sad. Very few of them could keep from wandering off key. The flashlights flickered in the darkness. She remembered her father reading her a Pogo comic strip, the firefly explaining that when the light was lit, they’d locate the ladies; when it was dark, they’d sneak up. Her dear father, laughing while he read it to her. As dead as anything, now.
…there’s one thing very clear:
Things change! Things will change.
That old metamorphosis rag, Clary thought. Plus ça change, she said to herself, proud of her detachment. She looked around the audience, seeing the fathers and mothers as little children themselves, part of a long undulating chain of children. And the children parents of their own children, soon. Nothing ending, Things Change really meaning they don’t.
A mother behind Clary was heaving loud sobs. She couldn’t hold her video camera still; its red stability light was flashing, on and off, like a firefly.
We grow, we’re not the same.
Your life will change, and it will set you free!
Clary knew what made the parents around her cry, more or less openly: that everything must grow and change and—rather than being set free—must die, all these children too. We die, they will die, their children will be dead. We resist mourning, because we know we will have to mourn soon enough, and the resistance makes us weep. Their greenness is a kind of grief—she thought that was Larkin. Or Dylan Thomas? She needed Paul to tell her.
Turning to leave, she saw Lorraine standing at the back with Pearce on her hip. Impossible to tell from that distance if she was crying or not, but she was smiling, anyway. Her pointy, crooked teeth showing, her dark eyes crumpled, her thin arm strong around Pearce. He had never sat so solidly on Clary’s hip. He had grown.
Clary turned away and tried to calculate which door she could get to fastest. Did Lorraine even know that she worked at the school? She would think that Clary was there spying on the children. Everything was so awful.
Then Lorraine was beside her, and Pearce saw her. He jumped in shocked surprise, and threw his arms out toward her, crying, “Clah! Clah!”
S
he didn’t know what to do—she couldn’t reach back to him, she couldn’t ignore him. Her breasts hurt. This was the most pain she had ever felt.
“Hey, Clary,” Lorraine said, sounding happy. “Hold Pearce while I go give Trevor a hug?”
Without any more fuss than that, she transferred Pearce over and dodged through the crowd to find Trevor, not looking back. Pearce’s arms went around Clary’s neck, and her arms around him, and they were quiet in the middle of all that crowd. He smelled so good.
“Where’s my mom?” Dolly asked, coming up from the Grade 4 rows.
“She’s here,” Clary said quickly, in case Dolly might think she had stolen Pearce. “She’s gone to congratulate Trevor.”
“I didn’t mean she would leave,” Dolly said, her nervous eyes darting around the crowd. “I was just worried about her.”
Of course her mother would leave, Clary thought. Was leaving, like everybody was; would walk away from her and be gone. It was a butterfly life, not permanent, no-how. Might as well make the best of it. Pearce tugged at Clary’s arm to be put down. He wanted to run to Trevor.
He said, “Re-ev, Re-ev,” with his mouth pushed out as if that would help to call him gently, his voice giving it two notes.
“He copies that from you,” Dolly said.
Clary put Pearce down and let him run. She kissed Dolly’s cheek and said, “I’ve missed you all very much.”
Then she darted off through the milling children to keep sight of Pearce. It was all right, Lorraine had him; she swooped him up and settled him on her hip again, and they waved to Clary, and they were gone.
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